README.md

What's Lua RTOS?

Lua RTOS is a real-time operating system designed to run on embedded systems, with minimal requirements of FLASH and RAM memory. Currently Lua RTOS is available for ESP32, ESP8266 and PIC32MZ platforms, and can be easilly ported to other 32-bit platforms.

Lua RTOS has a 3-layer design:

In the top layer there is a Lua 5.3.4 interpreter which offers to the programmer all the resources provided by the Lua programming language, plus special modules for access the hardware (PIO, ADC, I2C, RTC, etc …), and middleware services provided by Lua RTOS (Lua Threads, LoRa WAN, MQTT, …).

In the middle layer there is a Real-Time micro-kernel, powered by FreeRTOS. This is the responsible for that things happen in the expected time.

In the bottom layer there is a hardware abstraction layer, which talk directly with the platform hardware.

For porting Lua RTOS to other platforms is only necessary to write the code for the bottom layer, because the top and the middle layer are the same for all platforms.

How is it programmed?

The Lua RTOS compatible boards can be programmed with The Whitecat IDE in two ways: using the Lua programming language directly, or using a block-based programming language that translates blocks to Lua. No matter if you use Lua or blocks, both forms of programming are made from the same programming environment. The programmer can decide, for example, to made a fast prototype using blocks, then change to Lua, and finally back to blocks.

How to get the Lua RTOS firmware?

Prerequisites

Please note you need probably to download and install drivers for your board's USB-TO-SERIAL adapter for Windows and Mac OSX versions. The GNU/Linux version usually doesn't need any drivers. This drivers are required for connect to your board through a serial port connection.

For Linux, the currently logged user should have read and write access the sUSB-TO-SERIAL device. On most Linux distributions, this is done by adding the user to dialout group with the following command:

$ sudo usermod -a -G dialout $USER

Method 1: get a precompiled firmware

Install The Whitecat Console. The Whitecat Console is a command line tool that allows the programmer to flash a Lua RTOS compatible board with the last available firmware.

When the Lua RTOS build process finish, the board will be flashed. It is possible that for certain operating systems, or boards, the flashing process fails, due to a not compatible device name for your board's USB-TO-SERIAL adapter. In this case change the default configuration to met your board or operating system requirements, as described above.